Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder
by LiveinLivingColor
Summary: A year ago she ran away, and now she's back to put her life back together. [AU LL]


A/N: I've been out of Gilmore Girls fanfiction writing for a long time now. I'm writing a crossover with Gilmore and Grey's Anatomy (which can be found in the Grey's section, by the way), but that's been my only connection to this particular fandom in over a year. I've been really disappointed in seventh season, which is why I haven't written anything. But I had a dream about Gilmore Girls last night, so I tweaked it a little (aka I took out the random parts from Moulin Rouge that suddenly appeared) and here it is. This may very well suck, but that's up to you. Review, please! Oh, and the ending is completely random. Blame the dream.

Lorelai stood in front of the door to the Dragonfly Inn and took a deep breath. It had been a year. A year since she'd stood on these steps, a year since she'd been to Stars Hollow. After her marriage with Chris had gone awry (as, honestly, she knew it would from the start) it had been too much to deal with- her parents were yet again disappointed and she wasn't prepared to argue this with them, all of the townspeople had been giving her sympathetic looks that she didn't want to see, and her friends had tried to be supportive but ended up trying to convince her that she was still in love with Luke, which she knew was true but would never admit.

A job offer as a consultant for a company stationed in New York called out to her and she took it, packing and running away, not telling anyone but Rory and Sookie where she had gone. But she had been unhappy there- as much as her life would have been hard to bear in Stars Hollow, living in New York with no friends to speak of and her only real communication being her daily phone calls to Rory and weekly calls to Sookie, made her feel more alone than she'd ever felt before.

So here she was. Standing at the front steps to the Inn she'd left Sookie and Michel to care for, and she felt, at this moment, like a horrible, terrible person.

_How am I going to do this? What am I going to say?_ She thought, her heart racing as she moved one step closer to the front door.

"Lorelai?"

Saved by the bell. Or, really, Sookie.

"Sookie!"

She ran up the stairs, forgetting that she'd been standing out in front for twenty minutes already, pacing, and hugged her best friend.

"I didn't know you were coming back to visit! Did you call me? I didn't hear my phone but then you know I forget to check my voicemail-"

"Sookie." Lorelai smiled, putting a stop to her friend's rambling, "I…I'm home. I'm home for good."

"As in, you're moving back and you're never leaving us like this ever again?"

"I quit my job last week and got on a plane and I'm home."

This earned her another excited hug from Sookie, who brought her inside.

"Michel! Look who's back!" Sookie yelled, causing Michel to glance up at them. He pretended to look uninteresting, and said, snarkily, "Well, it's nice of you to grace us with your presence."

Lorelai glared at him. "Now, Michel, you know you missed me."

He walked over and, unexpectedly, hugged her. "You have _no _idea! You packed up and left me with the crazy woman! I had to get a prescription drug to work with her every day."

Lorelai laughed. "I missed you. Both of you."

XXXXXX

An hour later, Lorelai was sitting with Sookie at her kitchen table in her old home, which she'd never had the heart to sell. Paul Anka sat at her feet, happy that his owner was home and he was finally out of Babette's house, where Lorelai had left him when she'd moved.

"So, have you talked to…" Sookie made a gesture.

"No."

"Are you going to talk to-"

"No. Well, maybe. I don't know."

"You should talk to him, Lorelai."

"Why? I don't know what to say to him."

"He…he was devastated when you left. He came up to me about a week after you moved and asked me where you were."

"What did you say?"

"I said that you didn't tell anyone where you were going, but that you were calling when you got there and I'd let him know when I found out."

"You _told_ him?"

"Yes."

"Sookie!"

"You should have _seen_ his face when I said you moved to New York. It was like…it was like part of him was gone."

"He didn't seem to need that part of him the entire time we were broken up." She muttered.

"You might not have been together, but you were here. He knew you were here if he needed you, and honestly, you knew he was there if you needed him, too. You might not have been together, but you were still in reach."

"He didn't try to contact me at all."

"I told him he wasn't supposed to know, and not to call you, and he was respecting what you wanted."

Lorelai was silent for a moment, then looked at Sookie. "This isn't what I wanted. Not at all."

"I know." Sookie replied, shaking her head. "You wanted Luke."

Lorelai sighed. " I wanted Luke. I wanted to marry him and move in together and have kids and a minivan and be a soccer mom with Luke coaching their team, and go to PTA meetings and be able to say, 'This is my husband'. I wanted the whole package, but…we couldn't make it work."

"It wasn't that you couldn't make it work, you both just stopped trying at the same time and gave up."

"I didn't give up! He gave up on me."

"You slept with Chris the night of your break up. You could have made Luke listen to you, make him fight for you, but you gave up too. You both gave up."

They sat there, in silence, for a moment.

"I need to talk to him. I'm going to put away some things upstairs and change, but then I'm going to talk to him."

Sookie nodded. "Good. I'm going to go back to the Inn. You can't leave Michel in charge for more than an hour or so."

"Okay, I'll see you later. Thanks, Sookie."

"Any time."

Sookie went out the front door and smiled, whipping out her cell phone. She definitely was _not_ going to the Inn.

"Patty? It's Sookie. Start calling everyone. Lorelai's back and she's going to talk to Luke."

XXXXXX

Another half hour later, after Miss. Patty's entire phone tree had been contacted, everyone in the town was positioned somewhere, hidden, for the event they'd all been waiting for. Liz led Luke down the street after convincing him to go to the store with her, to get him out of the diner. As they turned the corner, Sookie, from behind her magazine, gave Liz a signal and Liz looked to her left, smiling.

"Hey, big brother, is that…that's Lorelai!"

Luke's head snapped up, and his eyes found Lorelai's.

"Lorelai." He breathed, staring at her as she stood, planted, across the street.

Liz slowly backed away, leaving Luke and Lorelai alone in the middle of the town, staring at each other.

Lorelai took a few steps toward him, slowly, then increased her speed until she was running.

She halted directly in front of him. "I need to talk to you."

He nodded and took her hand, leading her into the empty diner and closing all the blinds.

Lorelai sighed and looked up at him from her seat at the counter.

"We need to talk."

"We do."

There was a silence, and Luke sat next to her.

"You left."

"I…I didn't know what else to do."

"You could have talked to me, Lorelai, you didn't have to run off like that."

"I couldn't talk to you. This…this was different. This isn't something…that you could do anything about."

They both sighed.

"What happened to us, Luke?"

He shook his head. "I don't know. We got distant and busy and we stopped talking, and then the whole thing fell apart."

"We're going to get this all done, tonight."

"What do you mean?"

"We're talking this out. All night if we have to, but we're getting this done."

"Okay."

She pulled off her coat and heels and took a deep breath.

"So." She said, "Going back. We'll start with postponing the wedding the first time, and just keep going until we find out what went wrong."

XXXXXX

The next morning, Lorelai sat up, slowly, and immediately hit her head on the underside of the counter.

"Ow. Geez. What the…"

She looked around and saw Luke, sprawled about two feet away from her on the floor, still asleep. She was under the counter, tangled between two stools.

_Okay, we're both fully clothed. That's good._ She thought, relieved. Suddenly all of what had happened the night before flooded back. She remembered screaming, crying, and vaguely remembered throwing something at Luke.

Then, she remembered how the arguing had ended.

_Oh, no. _She thought, running a hand through her hair. She grabbed a napkin and a pen from her purse, scrawled a note, and set it next to Luke's head before running out the door.

_Luke-_

_Had to go, I'll call you later today. And…in case you don't remember, nothing happened. Don't worry._

_-Lorelai_

She wasn't completely lying.

Within ten minutes, she was at Sookie's door, being greeted by a very half-asleep Jackson.

"Lorelai, you're back. Sookie said you came last night…"

"Yeah. Hi, Jackson. I really need to talk to Sookie. Is she awake?"

"Yeah, hang on."

A minute later, Sookie was pulling her into the house and leading her to the living room.

"Details!" She yelled, and Lorelai sighed.

"I slept with Luke."

"What?!"

"No! No, Sookie, not like that. I literally slept with Luke. As in, fully clothed, fell asleep under the counter and hit my head on it this morning kind of sleep."

"Oh." Sookie looked relatively disappointed.

"We talked until at least three this morning about what went wrong. There was a lot of screaming and crying involved, and then…"

"Then what?" Sookie was on the edge of her seat.

"Then I kissed him."

"You what?!"

"I kissed him. And I don't even know if he'll remember. It was so late by then…we just sat there staring at each other, and the next thing I remember was waking up, so I'm assuming we fell asleep right about then."

"Wow."

"Yeah. Wow."

There was a knock at the door, and Sookie got up to answer it.

"Hi, Luke. Yeah, she's here. Do you want to talk to her? Okay, hang on."

Sookie walked, giddily into the living room.

"Luke's here. Talk."

Lorelai stood up, reluctantly, and went outside to the porch where he stood.

"It's my fault-" She stopped, laughing, as he said the same thing at the same time.

They stood there in an uncomfortable silence.

"This is stupid." She said, laughing. "We've had a successful conversation before-"

She was cut off, suddenly, by Luke's lips on hers. She was instantly reminded of that day- was it over two years ago now?- that he'd came to her house, after they'd been broken up, and kissed her like this.

_Déjà vu._ She thought, smiling against his lips.

Sookie stood in the doorway, doing a very Sookie-style happy dance as she dialed.

"Patty? It's Sookie again. I think they're getting back together, and it's on my front porch!"

A/N: So. Really random. Probably bad. But I have to get back into writing their characters again. I could use tips or concrit on my characterization, if anyone has any. Thanks!


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